Thanks, but IIRC they perform more like yum 'exclude' - i.e. ignore all updates of the package in the future. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Portage allows you to skip just this update and, when another update hits the Portage, I will see it in --update --pretend and can check with changelog and forums if it's ok for me to update. It's not something particularly fancy, it's something I use regularly - "I don't want to upgrade right now but may consider when it hits version 4.3.* in Portage", like that.

Portage today, IMO, is about 5x more powerful than pacman+AUR - it allows you to keep your system exactly in the state you want it to be. With Gentoo you are the developer of your own system with a help from others. Arch, in this sense, is the same as Fedora or Ubuntu - you're a user. A passenger.

Arch also lucks the best feature of Gentoo - these forums _________________Happy Gentoo user since 1.4 rc1

Thanks, but IIRC they perform more like yum 'exclude' - i.e. ignore all updates of the package in the future. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Portage allows you to skip just this update and, when another update hits the Portage, I will see it in --update --pretend and can check with changelog and forums if it's ok for me to update. It's not something particularly fancy, it's something I use regularly - "I don't want to upgrade right now but may consider when it hits version 4.3.* in Portage", like that.

I don't know pacman and yum, but portage allows you to do what you said - i.e. ignore only a specified range of package versions.

Syshalt wrote:

With Gentoo you are the developer of your own system with a help from others. Arch, in this sense, is the same as Fedora or Ubuntu - you're a user. A passenger.

Thanks, but IIRC they perform more like yum 'exclude' - i.e. ignore all updates of the package in the future. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

That's how it works, yes. Pacman indeed does not have the equivalent of putting =app-category/app-name-1.0.1 in /etc/portage/package.mask, which would mask just that one version. But you're notified about the latest available version during upgrades, the output will be something like "ignoring app-name update from 0.6.5 to 0.8.1"

Syshalt wrote:

Portage today, IMO, is about 5x more powerful than pacman+AUR - it allows you to keep your system exactly in the state you want it to be.

Yes, but Gentoo has a longer initial setup time and requires more maintenance. It's a tradeoff.

Syshalt wrote:

With Gentoo you are the developer of your own system with a help from others. Arch, in this sense, is the same as Fedora or Ubuntu - you're a user. A passenger.

I wouldn't go that far. It's quite a lot easier to modify a package in Arch than in those distros, because PKGBUILDs are a lot simpler than say RPM spec files.

Syshalt wrote:

Arch also lucks the best feature of Gentoo - these forums

Arch has a great forum and also a brilliant wiki. I'd say Arch and Gentoo are quite the same in this matter. One big difference though - Arch forums have a very strict 'no controversial topics' policy, so no politics talk or similar "fun" stuff you see at OTW here.

Portage today, IMO, is about 5x more powerful than pacman+AUR - it allows you to keep your system exactly in the state you want it to be.

I agree. When I was messing around with Arch on one of my laptops, I wanted to install a git version of mesa off AUR, but I kept running into trouble because the in-repo mesa was named mesa, and the AUR version was mesa-git. And pacman didn't realize that mesa-git should replace mesa. I kept getting errors that the files in mesa-git conflicted with mesa and it wouldn't install.

I think I tried removing mesa, but all I remember is that I gave up.

Edit: Oh, now I remember. I did remove mesa but then it had all these dependencies like dri-intel that I had to replace with dri-intel-git, and all these other assorted packages.

I prefer gentoo because of how easy it is to customize and compile software. Especially tailoring your own kernel. I have never found another distro where it is as easy as gentoo to customize your own kernel. Also, multiple versions of software. Gentoo has the flexibility to run a solid stable system, yet use bleeding edge packages of certain things. Even the whole system if you really like living on the edge.

Good point, this is where Gentoo truly shines. Kernel compilations feels really integrated in Gentoo. In other distro's is more of an afterthought. Multiple package versions and package.keywords are excellent.

I recently learnt that Arch strip packages of it's docs ( /usr/share/docs is almost empty )_________________Please add [solved] to the initial post's subject line if you feel your problem is resolved. Help answer the unanswered

I arrived in gentoo coming from arch about three weeks ago, I really like gentoo's more attenion in stability and securiy than arch. Good job!
But I have a question, yes it's true that through the eyes of a newcomer like me, gentoo seems a bit abondoned nowadays. Why?
Perhaps for you it's a stupid question, but why gentoo arrived at this point? In 2003 it was in the top 5 of distrowatch ranking, now it's only the 20th! What caused this falling in the past years? And what's the status of the today Gentoo developing?
Thank you in advance for your answers!

At first I thought that "less to mmap()" wouldn't necessarily lead to a performance advantage, but it would have implications in terms of a reduced memory footprint (which I do care about). More 'free' RAM available to the OS might help performance somewhat, but only as a second-order effect, I thought. After all, a branch not taken doesn't cost me additional CPU cycles, even if it's taking up space in memory, right?

I think you're confused about what mmap does. It doesn't load things into RAM, it maps them, so that it's loaded when needed.

But doing so isn't free. It has to parse the file and figure out what maps belong where whenever you run something that use it. This increases load-times._________________Petition for Better 64-bit ATI Drivers - Sign Here
http://www.petitiononline.com/atipet/petition.html

I couldn't get internet connection working in Arch (dhcpcd just wouldn't work), so I moved over to Gentoo. I wasn't very familiar with bash shell at the time, and as awesome as they say it may be, Arch's manual is utter crap. Gentoo's manual is much, much more detailed, it tells you exactly what commands to type in, what the output should look like, etc.

I couldn't get internet connection working in Arch (dhcpcd just wouldn't work), so I moved over to Gentoo. I wasn't very familiar with bash shell at the time, and as awesome as they say it may be, Arch's manual is utter crap. Gentoo's manual is much, much more detailed, it tells you exactly what commands to type in, what the output should look like, etc.

Some people love Mac OS / Mac OS X due too the overall speed of the OS (user tests have shown that Mac OS X on Intel cpu's runs faster and smoother than Windows), also just like Windows users, if a user grew up on an Apple they stick with Apple.

WHAT A LOAD OF CRAP!

Yes, maybe with basic hardware that's true.

But when powerhouse graphics card come into scene - FAIL, MAC OS X FAIL. Steam games run slower, OpenGL open source games run slower.

Second monitor comes into scene - FAIL, MAC OS X FAIL (yeah you work with program on one screen and it's menu is on the other screen). Heck, even not-basic monitors with >=1900x1200 resolution will make MAC OS X FAIL (yeah, no DPI scaling)

I couldn't get internet connection working in Arch (dhcpcd just wouldn't work), so I moved over to Gentoo. I wasn't very familiar with bash shell at the time, and as awesome as they say it may be, Arch's manual is utter crap. Gentoo's manual is much, much more detailed, it tells you exactly what commands to type in, what the output should look like, etc.

Probably a stupid question. I only ask because I did see someone post it as a statement of fact on youtube (they're all experts on there )

It did get me thinking though. I would have assumed Gentoo would be faster with compiling from source and building a custom kernel, etc?_________________Neo wasn't searching for the matrix.. he was doing an overnight emerge
Reiser is a killer filesystem.

I think it's a too general question. You can find a benchmark that shows Gentoo is faster, and vice versa. Gentoo's primary goal is not speed by the way._________________http://phajdan-jr.blogspot.com/

I made another thread about this, but it got a BIT derailed and this thread seems to be even closer to the topic (I probably should've brought this thread back rather than starting mine...whoops).

I switched from Arch to Gentoo about 2 weeks ago now. The reasons are actually quite simple:

1. Arch isn't very customizable. Compiling custom versions of packages isn't that easy and neither is changing configure switches on a package. Sure it's doable, but not as super-easy as it is in Gentoo.
2. You can't specify specific package versions on Arch. If i put gnome (say, because i don't want GNOME3) in IgnorePkg/IgnoreGroup, on next rebuild due to a soname bump, GNOME apps will start breaking, and Arch does those rebuilds every 2 weeks or so, whereas if i keyword to a specific version in Gentoo, it will always stay at that version and revdep-rebuild will rebuild that version on soname bumps, not force me to a newer version.
3. Arch is NOT stable and it's stupid to run on a server. As an example, right now you can not build an Android ROM on Arch because they upgraded to Perl 5.14 with no way to go back, which breaks the compile.
4. Arch takes bleeding-edge to a stupid level with some of the things they do. They were one of the first distros to switch KDE to KDE4, the Perl 5.14 example above and much much more.

For me, the speed of Gentoo is nice, but it means little. Though I could not be happier on Gentoo.

As most users posted in this thread, choosing between Arch and Gentoo comes down to a couple of simple questions

1. (root) source-based vs binary?
Gentoo is a pure source based distribution
Arch is binary with additional compilation, when needed

2. Control vs. simplicity/minimalism?
Gentoo gives You complete control over the system, but "with great power comes great responsibility" (compared to other mainstream distributions)
Arch gives You simplicity and minimalism, but (as meny before mentioned) is much less configurable, then Gentoo

3. What do You need?
Ask Yourself this.. do I really need all those features? Do I really need total control, USE flags, compilation etc? If the answer is no, don't bother. Managing all those fatures will take You more time, then on Arch (or any binary distro), and along antipathies will come. After a while You will end up with a uncompleted setup, lots of time lost and productivity output lowered.

The last thing is (IMHO) the most important question You should ask Yourself before making any move.

I've beed there..couple of weeks ago I had a working Arch environment on my laptop and was very pleased with it. Why did a try Gentoo..because I wanted to learn more, go deeper and I had time. If something goes wrong, I can always go back (still have my notes:)).

While this is something you have to watch out for, IMO it's neither a positive or a negative really for Gentoo. I'm sure that 99% of Gentoo users would switch to a binary distro that gave you as much flexibility as Gentoo, but zero compile times. That's EXTREMELY not feasible, and no one's managed to do it yet, but maybe someone will.

It also isn't a downside because IMO, the flexibility is worth it just for the customisable versions and USE flags, the performance jump of SANE customized CFLAGS wouldn't be worth it, but IMO, if that's why you're using Gentoo, you're using Gentoo for the wrong reasons.

While this is something you have to watch out for, IMO it's neither a positive or a negative really for Gentoo. I'm sure that 99% of Gentoo users would switch to a binary distro that gave you as much flexibility as Gentoo, but zero compile times. That's EXTREMELY not feasible, and no one's managed to do it yet, but maybe someone will.

It also isn't a downside because IMO, the flexibility is worth it just for the customisable versions and USE flags, the performance jump of SANE customized CFLAGS wouldn't be worth it, but IMO, if that's why you're using Gentoo, you're using Gentoo for the wrong reasons.

I never said, I was using Gentoo because of it's source-based nature. What I did say, was that this nature (and all it's consequences) is one of the things one must take in to account when choosing weather to use Gentoo or leave it be.

The reasons why I did give (am giving) Gentoo a try, where mentioned in my earlier post;)

The issue is not the concept of bleeding edge itself, but KISS also seems to apply to their update-philosophy. I mean, Gentoo is bleeding edge too, but you got "~arch" and you can choose package versions, slots and so on very easily...

On Arch you got much fun with ARM then and have to mask the whole package and update it manually.

Furthermore Arch would be useless without AUR and that sadly proves my point.

The issue is not the concept of bleeding edge itself, but KISS also seems to apply to their update-philosophy. I mean, Gentoo is bleeding edge too, but you got "~arch" and you can choose package versions, slots and so on very easily...

On Arch you got much fun with ARM then and have to mask the whole package and update it manually.

Furthermore Arch would be useless without AUR and that sadly proves my point.

Well Gentoo is sanely bleeding-edge in another way as well. If stuff doesn't work under, say GCC 4.6 or Glibc 2.14 or Perl 5.14, Arch just pushes it to core (all 3 of those examples are in Arch's core repo) and doesn't really give a crap, with Gentoo, all 3 things i mentioned are hardmasked so you can't really accidentally break your system by upgrading to one of those. You sort of have to know what you're doing to package.unmask it.

Have been reading an interview with Arch developers lately, and, from what I've understood, for them KISS concept applies to the whole system management and maintenance. They don't change, patch etc. anything (almost) leaving it to the users.

Simply put.. Gentoo provides You with a playground and toys, while Arch offers You just the playground.
In other words, as Gentoo gives You control over the system, it provides You with lots of (great) tools to manage it. Arch with it's KISS philosophy does the same thing, only it will not give You anything besides pacman and some basic scripts. I would say Arch ENCOURAGES You to build the management and maintenace tools (preasumably bash scripts) by yourself. It's not badly maintained, it's juts raw by nature.

In that particular area, Arch requieres more maintenance time, then Gentoo. Packaging is another topic though..